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Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
(Phone: 818/354-6278)
RELEASE: 01-174
"We haven't seen terrain like this before. It looks like erosion is
still going on, which is pretty surprising," said James Klemaszewski
of Academic Research Lab, Phoenix, AZ. Klemaszewski is processing
and analyzing the Galileo Callisto imagery with Dr. David A.
Williams and Dr. Ronald Greeley of Arizona State University, Tempe.
Callisto, about the same size as the planet Mercury, is the most
distant of Jupiter's four large moons. Callisto's surface of ice and
rock is the most heavily cratered of any moon in the solar system,
signifying that it is geologically "dead." There is no clear
evidence that Callisto has experienced the volcanic activity or
tectonic shifting that have erased some or all of the impact craters
on Jupiter's other three large moons.
The jagged hills in the new images may be icy material thrown
outward from a large impact billions of years ago, or the highly
eroded remains of a large impact structure, Williams said. Each
bright peak of dust is surrounded by darker dust that appears to be
slumping off the peak.
http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov
The close-ups and the first complete Callisto global color picture
from Galileo are available on the Internet at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/callisto
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